Always wanting to publish novels, but having the fortune to work in the data warehouse corner of technology, Sherry Li started to write the mysteries of the Microsoft Business Intelligence. She writes everything from T-SQL to MDX, ETL to Expressions to Scripting, Reporting to Cubes. You can find her writings at bisherryli.wordpress.com.

Keyboard shortcut Alt + F1 works now

SSMS has a rich set of keyboard shortcuts that works by default. But in SSMS 2008 I had one complain about the default Alt+F1 shortcut. The Alt+F1 shortcut is assigned to sp_help by default. It worked for tables, sort of. If you are a good designer and had followed the best practice of putting your tables in the appropriate schemas, using the Alt+F1 shortcut is quite a pain. You will need to wrap your schemanized table as the following for the shortcut to work.

Not any more in SSMS 2012. The fix is finally done. Either of the following will work by default. The old way of wrapping with [ ] will no longer work.

[HR].[Empoyees]

HR.Empoyees

This shortcut is equivalent to execute the sp_help procedure.

sp_help ‘[HR].[Empoyees]‘

Assign keyboard shortcut to sp_helptext

The system procedure sp_helptext is a great helper for developers who work on SQL codes day in and out. I used to have Ctrl+F1 mapped to it. Unfortunately, by default, in SSMS 2012, the shortcut Ctrl+F1 is now mapped to Display SQL Server Books Online.